Page 154 - English Reader - 7

me on the observation deck, where the lights are always so low that the
stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the

gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens
crawled slowly around us as the ship turned end over end with the

residual spin we had never bothered to correct.

“Well, Father,” he would say at last, “it goes on forever and forever, and

perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something
has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just

beats me.” Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae
would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear

plastic of the observation port.

It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of position that caused most

amusement to the crew. In vain I would point to my three papers in
the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal

Astronomical Society. I would remind them that my order has long
been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, ever since

the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and
geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the

Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear,
much more than that.

I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very
bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for

several billion years. Even the word nebula is misleading: this is a far
smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist—the stuff of unborn

stars-that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On the
cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous shell

of gas surrounding a single star.

154 Dolphin English Reader Book 7